Cedar Park Dad wrote:All this has happened before and will happen again-
Well this may help a little:
*People are no longer hanged from trees for the color of their skin. Jim Crow is dead. “No Dogs or Chinese/Irish/etc allowed” is dead.
*My daughter can grow up with the realistic expectation of seeing a woman President. Barriers limiting what she wants to do be it mom, explorer, mechanic, scientist, admiral (she mentioned this-yikes), CEO, or President are gone.
*The days of wink wink nudge nudge sexual harassment are over.
*Crime is down. Violent crime is at a 30 year low. Unless you’re involved in the entrepreneurial drug trade industry, crime statistics are even lower, to those of northern Europe.
*Education rates are at the highest levels in history.
*Life expectancy is at an all-time high.
*Our country boasts gals that are easy on the eyes from every country in the world.
*Our country boasts fattening food taken from every corner of the globe, and you can still find a good chicken fried steak.
*We now have movie theaters with full restaurants and bars and leather recliners.
*CHL is effectively the law of the land now.
*While some states have towards more regulation, increased federal laws have foundered, and politicians pushing that agenda have paid handsomely in Colorado.
Everything that is bad can be fixed. Everything that is good can be preserved.
It has happened before and WILL happen again --which is why all the progress you cite is not all that reassuring. Furthermore, a lot of what you cite is debatable. A few examples:
In my industry burdensome and useless regulations are growing at an exponential rate...from virtually none 10 years ago, to suffocating and onerous today, with no hope of relief in sight.
People are assaulted for the color of their skin, e.g. the knockout game. Furthermore, the black family has been pretty much destroyed by the liberal welfare state, and young black males are being killed and incarcerated in record number.
The flip-side of your daughter growing up to be CEO are things like female Marines who can't pass physical fitness tests, lowered standards in many fields to create the pretense of equal treatment, and female entitlement, versus actual equality. I won't even go into the less obvious sociological questions, such as the impact on child rearing and divorce.
Violent crime is down, corruption and subversion of the rule-of-law is way up. Arguably, an executive who violates and refuses to enforce the law is a bigger problem than the violent crime rate.
I don't know what an education rate is, but I see no evidence that there is been a per capita increase in educated people. People with college degrees and high school diplomas, yes, educated people, no. High school was more rigorous for my father back in the 30s than college is for most people attending today. Can anyone seriously suggest that ANYONE in Congress today is the intellectual equal of Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Washington, etc? Presidents 100 years ago spoke to intelligence, now they speak to idiocy and emotion. As much as I despise Wilson or FDR, they were men of intellect and accomplishment and very far removed from the clown now occupying the Oval Office. Geez, I think even LBJ, crude and vulgar as he was, was intellectually superior and harder working than this community organizer and divider we have now.
But really, those are all side issues. The veneer of civilization is thin...a theme that repeated itself often in the 20th century. Without the rule-of-law and a moral populace "civilization" can disappear with the blink of an eye. Financial collapse is a mathematical certainty.....the timing and extent are the only questions. Given a great enough calamity civilization could disappear virtually overnight. So, while there are grounds for optimism there are also grounds for concern, and it's a lot easier to destroy a civilization than to create one.